An outdoor ride today, which was nice. Not the driest of days, and truth be told I probably wouldn’t have gone outdoors had it not been for having a roofer round who was right outside my office window. I didn’t much fancy going on the turbo, staring at the PC and by proxy, him. That would have been weird.
So I opted for an outdoor smash, albeit with still the idea in mind of doing some sort of Sweet Spot effort.
As the route shows, I split this kinda in two. I did a short circuit I know to be ~15km. I decided to target ~225w, which given the outdoor conditions and knowing the second half of that segment is up hill, felt like it would go someway to approximating 20+ minutes of SST work.
However, I found myself going harder. I really pushed myself on that effort, and according to the Garmin I burned 518 calories, covering ~16km in 35 minutes. Bearing in mind I didn’t lap that properly, but instead took the lap start as being when I left my house… those are some high effort averages for my ability. Shame I didn’t lap it properly in hindsight.
What I will say is that headwind on the out leg was absolutely brutal.
But coming back? Doing 37kph up a 2% gradient? Wowsers… I have never felt as fast in my life. I was nailing it.
The second half of the ride was more meandering and recovering really. I only had about 20 minutes left after the first effort before I absolutely had to be home in time for my 2pm meeting. So I took about 7km’s of route along the Guild Wheel, before pulling in and took on three little climbs just to spice up the legs. Today was intended to be a harder effort, after all.
In the end I reckon I did about the same as I might do in an SST session. I’d say I didn’t feel like I cheated myself, and I definitely enjoyed being out and about. As I sit writing this it’s 17:44 and probably still light enough to have had an hour’s ride after work today. That’s promising.
The only thing now is … hopefully WW3 doesn’t kick off and spoil things. My God. Madness, eh?
